The Physical Impossibility of Death
in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).
By Damien Hirst, one of
the most
famous postmodernist artists.

Studies for a Self Portrait (1980).
(Detail) By Francis Bacon,
whose
disturbing style of painting combines
surrealist and expressionist imagery.
Although born in the 1900s, Bacon
produced some of the most avant
garde 20th century
paintings.

In this article we list the main schools
and styles of "Contemporary Art"
which emerged from the late-1960s onwards. Because "contemporary
art" superceded "modern art",
it is also referred to as Postmodernist
Art. Please note however, that the transition from modernism to
postmodernism was a gradual one, which took place during the decade
of the 1960s. Both styles thus co-existed with each other during this
time.

In addition, please note that one of the
most important differences between modern and postmodern art, concerns
the downgrading of the "finished product". The aim of nearly
all modern artists, for instance, was
to create an enduring and unique work of art like a painting, sculpture,
drawing, or other type of object. By contrast, postmodernist
artists have less interest in this kind of product and more interest
in the ideas behind it. This helps to explain the growth of new types
of art - such as installation art (including sound and video installations),
conceptualism (a wide category of 'ideas art'), happenings
(type of performance art), video installations, projection mapping, and
outdoor earthworks (environmental constructions) - in which either there
is no finished product to speak of, or else it is transient and recorded
only as an 'event'. Revealingly, over the past 20 years, the Turner
Prize for Contemporary Art has been won by 2 painters, 0 sculptors,
and 10 installation artists.

CONTEMPORARY ART MOVEMENTS

Pop Art (1960s
onwards)

Pop
Art was both modernist and contemporary. It started out by depicting
a more up-to-date reality, using images of film-stars and other celebrities,
as well as mass-made consumer goods. But this was rapidly eclipsed by
an increasing post-modern focus on impact and style. See for instance
our short guide to Andy
Warhol's Pop Art of the sixties.

Word Art/Word
Painting (1960s onwards)

Word
Art was a brand new form of painting or sculpture which used text-based
imagery. It was associated with artists like Robert Indiana (b.1928),
Jasper Johns (b.1930), On Kawara (1932-2014), Barbara
Kruger (b.1945) and Christopher
Wool (b.1955).

Conceptualism
(1960s onwards)

Conceptual
art is a postmodernist art movement founded on the principle that
art is a 'concept' rather than a material object. That is to say, the
'idea' which a work represents is considered its essential component,
and the "finished product", if it exists at all, is regarded
essentially as a form of documentation rather than as an artifact. The
origins of Conceptualism go back to Dada
and the early 20th century avant-garde artist Marcel
Duchamp, but it wasn't until the 1960s that it became a recognizable
movement and acquired a name. Conceptual art has the ability to deliver
ideas quite powerfully, hence it has served as a popular vehicle for socio-political
comment. In addition, by downplaying the need for any painterly or sculptural
skills - indeed, for any craftsmanship at all - it retains a subversive
edge by challenging the entire tradition of a work of art as a unique
and valuable object. Some experts point to the fact that the postmodern
era demands more than the passive experience of "viewing" a
work of art, and that Conceptualism provides a more interactive experience.
Whether this added entertainment value helps an "idea" to qualify
as a work of art, is rather doubtful. For works by one of Europe's first
conceptual artists, please see also: Yves
Klein's Postmodernist art (1956-62).

An illustration of this issue is the large
collection of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which belonged
to Nazi concentration camp victims. It has been suggested that this has
the characteristics of a Conceptual artwork, because walking past the
huge pile of shoes helps us to comprehend the terrifying reality of the
gas chambers. Indeed it does, but frankly it doesn't turn the shoes into
a work of art, or indeed any type of artistic statement. (Compare Holocaust
art 1933-45.) It is a political or historical statement. Thus the
difficulty for Conceptualism is to show how it qualifies as art,
as opposed to entertainment, theatre, or political commentary.

Emerging in America and Europe in the early
1960s, Performance art is an
experimental art form inspired by Conceptual art, as well as Dada, Futurism,
the Bauhaus and (in America) the Black Mountain College. Performance is
generally supposed to be characterized by its "live" nature
- the fact that the artist communicates directly with the audience - and
its impact, whether amusing or shocking, must be memorable. A good example
is the series of self-destructive machines - probably the most famous
examples of kinetic art -
created by the Swiss artist Jean
Tinguely (1925-91). Even so, the exact difference between innovative
theatre and Performance art is hard to detect. Moreover its insistence
on being labelled "art" - traditionally a bourgeois event -
sits awkwardly alongside its anti-establishment ethic.

Performance now includes events and "happenings"
by visual artists, poets, musicians, film makers, video artists and so
on. The late-1960s and 1970s also witnessed the appearance of "Body
Art", a type of Performance in which the artist's own flesh becomes
the canvas and subsequently "performs" in a suitably shocking,
newsworthy manner (for more see below). During the 1980s, Performance
art increasingly relied on technology (video, computers) to deliver its
"artistic" message. Contemporary artists associated with this
genre include the pioneer Allan
Kaprow (1927-2006), Yves Klein
(1928-62), Gilbert &
George (b.1943, 1942), and the extraordinary Joseph
Beuys (1921-86), who created the innovative performance How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). Another innovative artist
is the Korean-American Nam June Paik (1932-2006), who began in performance
art before working with televisions and video, and thereafter installations.

Fluxus Movement
(1960s)

Fluxus
was an avant-garde group of artists (its name means "flowing"
in Latin) led by the Lithuanian-born art theorist George Maciunas (1931-78),
which first appeared in Germany before spreading to other European capitals
and then New York City, which became the centre of its activities. Its
stated aims - a confusing mixture of "revolutionary" and "anti-art"
art forms - carried on the traditions of Dada, focusing on Happenings
(known as Aktions in Germany), and various types of street art. Leading
members included the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, the Japanese-born
conceptualist Yoko Ono, and the German performance and video artist Wolf
Vostell (b.1932). Maciunas' ultimate goal was to get rid of all fine art
on the basis that it was a waste of resources and little more than a bourgeois
indulgence. Fluxus artists collaborated to blend different media (visual,
literary, musical) into a number of "events", involving installations,
happenings, photography and film. Fluxus festivals of contemporary art
were held throughout the 60s in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, London,
Paris and New York. See also Viennese Actionism, under Body Art, below.

Installation
(1960s onwards)

Installation
art is a new art form which came to attention in the USA during
the 1960s, although the idea dates back to the Surrealist exhibitions
created by Marcel Duchamp and others, when works of art were arranged
to form a complex and compelling environment. The Russian painter and
designer El Lissitzky was another
pioneer whose 1923 "Proun Room" at the Berlin Railway Station
was an early type of Installation, as were the room-filled Merzbilder
constructions of Kurt Schwitters
(1887-1948). Other more recent examples include Lucio Fontana's 1950s
"Spatial Environments", and Yves Klein's 1958 show "Le
Vide" (The Void), which was an empty gallery room. Also, in the 1960s
the Groupe Recherche d'Art Visuel created early installations in
the form of kinetic light environments. An installation typically occupies
an entire space, like a room or larger area, and consists of several different
components. The American sculptor Ed Kienholz used cars and institutional
furniture in the 1960s, to present an installation commenting on death
and social issues. His fellow sculptor George Segal, used lifesize plaster
figures portrayed in everyday settings (like waiting for a subway train)
to comment on the mundane. Other recent installation artists have included
Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Christian
Boltanski, Richard Wilson and Tracey Emin. See also LED installation art
- a form of kinetic art - by Tatsuo Miyajima (b.1957).

Video Installations
(1960s onwards)

In the 1960s, artists began to exploit
the medium of video in an attempt to redefine art. A number of video artists,
for instance, have challenged the preconceived idea of art as high-brow,
high priced, and only appreciable by society's elite. Others have used
video to demolish the idea of art being a commodity - a unique "finished
product" - by making their video art
an "experience" (rather than something to own), or a tool for
change, a medium for ideas. Video also allows the artist to reveal the
actual process of creating art. Typically, video installations combine
video with a sound track and/or music, and may involve other interactive
devices, making full use of the surrounding environment to stimulate the
audience. Pioneers of video installation include: Nam
June Paik (1932-2006) whose 1960s arrangements typically involved
multiple television monitors in sculptural arrangements; as well as Andy
Warhol (1928-87), Peter Campus (b.1937), Wolf Vostell (b.1932), Bill Viola
(b.1951), Gary Hill and Tony Oursler. In Britain, video artists include:
Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price, Jeremy Deller, Steve McQueen, Gillian
Wearing, Douglas Gordon, Sam Taylor-Wood, David Hall and Tony Sinden,
among many others.

Minimalism
(1960s onwards)

Emerging in America in the second half
of the 60s, Minimalism/Minimal
Art is a refined form of abstract art
which succeeded Post Painterly Abstraction (a type of late Abstract
Expressionism) to become an influential style around the world in
sculpture, painting and architecture. In the area of fine art, Minimalism
is characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of
expressive content. Objects are presented in their elemental, geometric
form, wholly devoid of emotion. Minimalist works (of sculpture and painting)
are often composed of bare uniform elements making up some type of a grid
or pattern. Regularity is almost essential to minimize any glint of expressionism.

Minimalism was the final stage in the logical
development of Abstract Expressionism, whose style went from gestural
(action-painting) to plane-work (colour
field painting) to sharply defined geometrical planes and patterns
(hard edge painting) to Minimal Art. Along the way it gradually jettisoned
all feeling and emotion, until it arrived at an austere and impersonal
form of so-called artistic purity or truth. All that remains is the intellectual
idea of the piece: there's no emotion. This is why Minimalism is close
to Conceptualism - both are concerned with the basic idea or concept
of the work created.

Photorealism
was a style of painting that appeared in the late 1960s, in which subjects
(people or urban scenes) are painted in a highly detailed manner, resembling
photographs. Most practitioners work directly from photographs or digital
computer imagery, and the subject matter is quite banal and of no special
interest. Instead the real focus is on the precision and detail achieved
by the artist, and its impact on the viewer. Photographic realism was
largely inspired by Pop-Art - banal subject-matter was common to both,
and certain artists (eg. Malcolm Morley and Mel Ramos) used both styles.
however Photo-Realism lacks Pop-Art's whimsical or ironic humour, and
can even be faintly disturbing. What's more, paradoxically, its microscopic,
indiscriminate detail can actually create a slightly "unreal"
effect. Leading members of the Super-Realist movement include Richard
Estes - who specializes in street scenes containing complex glass-reflections
- and Chuck Close, who excels
at monumental pictures of expressionless faces. Other Hyper-Realist painters
include Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings and John
Doherty. Hyperrealist sculptors include Duane
Hanson (1925-96), John de Andrea
(b.1941), Carole Feuerman
(b.1945), Ron Mueck and Robert Gober.

Earthworks
(Land or Environmental Art) (1960s, 1970s)

Land art,
which emerged largely in the United States during the 1960s, uses or interacts
with the landscape in order to create artistic shapes or "events."
Referred to by a variety of names, it typically re-fashions natural forms
or enhances them with man-made materials. Pioneers of this artform include
Robert Smithson, Richard
Long and Andy Goldsworthy, as well as the interventionists Christo
and Jeanne-Claude. Note that Land art is quite different from man-made
monuments such as Stonehenge. The latter was errected for its ceremonial
or religious significance and is not considered to be an element of the
land. Even the celebrated Presidential portraits of Mount Rushmore, while
clearly works of art, do not qualify as Land art since they do not celebrate
the land but the images made from it. For similar styles, please see Art
Movements, Periods, Schools (from about 100 BCE).

Given the name "poor art" by
the Italian critic Germano Celant (who also wrote an influential book
entitled "Arte Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art"),
Arte Povera was an
anti-commercial style of art that was concerned mainly with the physical
qualities of the materials used. The latter typically consists of ordinary
or otherwise worthless things, such as scraps of newspapers, old clothes,
earth, metal fragments and so on, although in practice quite elaborate
and expensive materials are sometimes used (!). Arte Povera was initiated
by a group of avant-garde artists in Italy, whose members included: Piero
Manzoni (1933-63), Mario Merz (1925-2003), Michelangelo Pistoletto (b.1933),
Pino Pascali (1935-68), Jannis Kounellis (b.1936), Luciano Fabro (b.1936),
Gilberto Zorio (b.1944) and Giuseppe Penone (b.1947). Another important
figure was the Turin art dealer and promoter Enzo Sperone.

Supports-Surfaces
(c.1966-72)

Supports-Surfaces was a conceptualist group
of young left-wing French artists who exhibited together from about 1966
to 1972. (The name was chosen rather belatedly for their show "Animation,
Recherche, Controntation" at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville
de Paris). Members of the group included Andre-Pierre Aarnal, Vincent
Bioules, Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze, Noel Dolla, Toni Grand,
Bernard Pages, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Patrick Saytour, Andre Valensi, and
Claude Viallat. The group aimed to divest art of its symbolic and romantic
qualities - to liberate art from the tyranny of taste, the banality of
Expressionism, the sentimentality of late Surrealism and the purity of
Art Concrete, as they put it - and so they deconstructed the act of painting
to its essential physical properties - the canvas and stretchers
(frames). Noted for their touring outdoor exhibitions, the group employed
a variety of unusual materials in their works, such as stones, waxed fabric,
carboard and rope, and the works themselves were often folded, crushed,
burned or dyed and exhibited on the floor or hung without a frame. They
issued numerous explanatory treatises and posters in an attempt to explain
their actions, and published a regular journal "Peinture/Cahiers
Theoretiques." In general their works can be interpreted as a
variant of Conceptualism.

Contemporary
Realism

A term used in its narrow sense to denote
an American style of painting which emerged in the late 1960s and early
1970s, in the works of a variety of artists, such as Philip Pearlstein,
Neil Wellilver and William Bailey. It is characterized by figurative works
executed in a raw objective style, without the distortions of Cubist or
Expressionist interpretation. Contemporary Realists deliberately rejected
abstract art, choosing instead to depict down-to-earth subjects in a straightforward
naturalistic manner.

In its wider sense, the term Contemporary
Realism encompasses all post-1970 painters and sculptors who focus on
representational art, where the
object is to portray the "real" rather than the ideal. Thus
genre paintings or figurative works whose subjects are depicted (eg) in
a romantic or nostalgic light are excluded from this genre. There is no
general school of Contemporary Realism as such, and many artists - including
abstractionists - have experimented with this more traditional approach.
Perhaps the most interesting exponent of Contemporary Realism is the figurative
master Lucian Freud (1922-2011),
whose powerful studies of the human body manage to convey both grittiness
and love. For earlier styles of realist painting, see Modern
Art Movements (1870-1970).

Post-Minimalism
(1971 onwards)

A buzzword first used by the American art
critic Robert Pincus-Witten when he described works by Eva
Hesse as "Post-Minimalism" in Artforum in 1971. Hesse together
with other artists were reacting against the rigid and impersonal formalism
of Minimal art by focusing on the physical and creative processes involved.
This new style, known as "Process Art", was highy transient
and utilized unstable materials which condensed, evaporated or deteriorated
without the artist having any control. It became a trend as a result of
two shows in 1969: "When Attitudes Become Form" at the Berne
Kunsthalle and "Procedures/ Materials" at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York. Prominent Post-Minimalist artists,
as well as Hesse, included the American sculptor Richard
Serra and the German-born Conceptual artist Hans Haake.

In a broader sense, however, Post-Minimalism
(like Post-Impressionism) encompasses a number of differing styles, as
well as types of painting, sculpture and other contemporary artforms,
which succeeded Minimalism in the late-1960s and 1970s, and which use
it as an aesthetic or conceptual reference point from which to develop.
In very simple terms, as Minimalist artists began to take more of a conceptual
approach to their art and focused on conveying a single truth, they gradually
crossed over into Post-Minimalism. Indeed many Conceptual artists are
often spoken of as Post-Minimalists. If this sounds too complicated, don't
worry: we are now in serious theoretical territory, involving epistemological
and ontological issues which require a Masters Degree to comprehend. Suffice
it to say that Post-Minimalism (not unlike Post-Modernism) shifts the
focus of art from form to image. How something is done and communicated
becomes as important as what is created.

Feminist Art
(mid-to-late 1960s onwards)

Feminist
Art - art made by women about women's issues - emerged towards
the end of the 1960s and explored what it was to be a woman AND an artist
in a male dominated world. It first appeared in America and Britain, where
various feminist art groups were inspired by the women's liberation movement,
before spreading across Europe. In comparison with the elitist formal
and impersonal subject matter pursued by male avant-garde artists, work
by women artists offered emotion, and real-life experience. British and
US feminist artists employed inherently female symbolic forms, raising
the status of so-called "female" materials and practices. They
addressed fundamental gender-based issues, such as giving birth, motherhood,
and forced seduction, as well as wider concerns such as racism and working
conditions. A specific style of Female art, the Pattern and Decoration
movement, sprang up in California during the 1970s, being composed largely
of women artists. They reacted against the severe austerity of Minimalizm
by juxtaposing identical or similiar patterns, and producing intense fusions
of colour and texture using traditional craft techniques, like weaving,
paper cut-outs and patchwork. Their beautiful use of colour was inspired
by the French Fauves movement of 1900s Paris, while their geometrical
and floral motifs were drawn from Islamic, Far Eastern, Celtic and Persian
Art. Prominent feminist artists include the Americans Nancy Spero (1926-2009),
Eleanor Antin (b.1935), Joan Jonas (b.1936), Judy
Chicago (b.1939). Mary Kelly (b.1941), Barbara Kruger (b.1945) and
Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), the Swedish artist Monica Sjoo, the English
artist Margaret Harrison (b.1940), to name but a handful. In the plastic
arts, one of the great feminist sculptors was Louise
Bourgeois (1911-2010).

New Subjectivity
(1970s)

"Nouvelle Subjectivité"
was the title given by the French curator and art historian Jean Clair,
to an international exhibition in 1976 at the Musée National
d'Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The show featured works
by American, British and European modern artists who rejected the dominant
abstraction and conceptualism in modern art in favour of a return to depicting
the reality of things, albeit in a modern manner. In their paintings,
they were concerned with careful observation of the real world.

Exponents of New Subjectivity employed
every format of canvas from monumental to small-scale, and worked in acrylics,
oils, and watercolours, as well as coloured pencils and pastels. In their
return to figuration and their representation of nature, they depicted
views of gardens, fields, swimming pools, portraits and still lifes. Typically,
they were skilled draughtsmen and academically trained painters, and constructed
their paintings according to the traditional Renaissance rules of linear
and arial perspective. Prominent artists associated with New Subjectivity
included the English artist David
Hockney, the American artist (active in England) R B Kitaj, the Swiss
artist Samuel Buri, and the French artists Olivier O Olivier, Christian
Zeimert, Michel Parre and Sam Szafran.

London School

A term used by the American painter RB
Kitaj in the catalogue of an exhibition he staged, in 1976 at the
Hayward Gallery, London, when Minimalism and Conceptualism were high fashion.
The show, entitled "Human Clay", focused exclusively on figurative
works of drawing and painting, and in the brochure RB Kitaj coined the
phrase "School of London" to refer to the individual
artists whose works were being shown. Since then, the term London School
has been used to refer to the group of artists associated with the city
at that time, who continued to practise forms of figurative work, in the
face of the avant-garde establishment. The principal artists involved
in this London School, included Michael Andrews, Francis
Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney (though actually living in America),
Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach,
and Leon Kossoff. As Minimal and Conceptual art began to fade in the late
1970s, a new generation of figurative painters and sculptors began to
appear, who took a renewed interest in the work of the school. (For a
brief guide to modern painters in Britain, see: Contemporary
British Painting.)

Graffiti Art
(1970s onwards)

Also known as "Street Art", "Spraycan
Art" and "Aerosol Art", Graffiti
art is a style of painting associated with hip-hop, a cultural
movement which sprang up in various American cities, especially on New
York subway trains, during the 1970s and 1980s. B-boys, the first generation
of hip-hop voiced the frustrations of urban minorities in their attempt
to create their own form of art, a non-commercial one that did not seek
to please the general public. They employed stencils, marker pens, and
aerosol spray cans, and wrote with industrial spray paint and acrylic
on all types of support: stone, plaster, metal, wood, and plastic. Their
"canvases" were subway trains, walls in urban areas and industrial
wastelands, subways, roofs and billboards. During the 1970s, Graffiti
Art spread to Europe and Japan and eventually crossed over from the street
into the gallery. (See biography of Banksy,
Britain's most famous graffiti stencil artist.) The heart of the movement
however, was New York City.

In New York an early pioneer, known by
his tag TAKI 183, was a youth from Washington Heights. The first women
graffiti artists were Barbara 62 and Eva 62. From 1971, artists began
adopting signature calligraphic styles to distinguish their work, and
also began breaking into subway train depots in order to apply their tag
on the sides of trains - a process called "bombing" -
with maximum effect. The train thus became their "gallery" as
it showed their work off across the city. The size and scale of tags
also increased leading in 1972 to the production of so-called "masterpieces"
or "pieces" by a graffiti sprayer known as Super Kool
223. A further development involved the inclusion of designs like polka
dots, checkers and crosshatches, and soon "Top-to-bottoms"
- works spanning the entire height of a subway car - began to appear,
as well as scenery and cartoon characters. Gradually the mainstream art
world started to take notice. The United Graffiti Artists (UGA), a group
founded in 1972 by Hugo Martinez, expanded its membership to include many
of the leading graffiti artists, with a view to showing works in official
venues, like the Razor Gallery. By the mid-1970s most of the creative
standards in graffiti writing had already been established, and the genre
began to stagnate. Also the NYC Metro Transit Authority began a twofold
campaign to secure depots and erase graffiti on a continuing basis. As
a result, taggers forsook the subway and took to the streets, where their
static art neccessarily received far less exposure. During the late-1980s
and 1990s, more artists began showing their works in galleries and renting
art studios, a practice which had already started a number of years earlier
with taggers like Jean-Michel
Basquiat - now one of the world's top contemporary artists - who dropped
his signature SAMO (Same Old Shit), in favour of mainstream opportunities.
Other famous graffiti artists include Keith
Haring (1958-90), Banksy (b.1973-4) and David
Wojnarowicz (1954-92). Graffiti is a form of the larger "Street
Art" movement, a style of outsider
art created outside of the framework of traditional art venues. It
embraces stencil graffiti, poster or sticker art, pop up art and street
installations, including the latest video projections, yarn bombings and
Lock-On sculptures. Street Art is sometimes referred to as "urban
art", "guerrilla art", "post-graffiti" or "neo-graffiti".

One of several styles of Postmodernism,
Neo-Expressionism
is a broad painting movement that appeared around 1980, in response to
the stagnation of Minimalism and Conceptual art, whose intellectualism
and self-style "purity" had dominated the 1970s but was now
beginning to get on many artists' nerves. Neo-Expressionists championed
the highly unfashionable practice of fine
art painting (condemned as "dead" by postmodernists) and
supported everything that the Modernists had tried to discredit: figuration,
emotion, symbolism, and narrative. They use sensuous colours, and incorporated
themes associated with numerous historical styles and movements, such
as the Renaissance, Mannerism, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism
and Pop-Art. Not surprisingly, in Germany, Neo-Expressionism was strongly
influenced by earlier German Expressionist groups like Der Blaue Reiter
and Die Brucke.

The movement embraced new painting in Germany
by artists like Georg Baselitz
(b.1938), Jorg Immendorf, Anselm
Kiefer, AR Penk, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard
Richter, as well as works by the "Ugly Realists"
such as Markus Lupertz. It also covered the Neue Wilden (New Wild
Ones, a reference to the 1900s style of Fauvism or "wild beasts")
whose members included Rainer Fetting. Following international shows like
"A New Spirit in Painting" (London Royal Academy, 1981) and
"Zeitgeist" (Berlin, 1982), the term Neo-Expressionism began
to be applied to other groups, like Figuration Libre in France,
Transavanguardia in Italy, the "New Image Painters"
and the so-called "Bad Painters." In America, the style,
while popular, has not produced the same calibre of work, with the exception
of artists like Philip Guston
(1913-80), Julian Schnabel, David Salle and others. In Britain, the style
is exemplified by the Rubenesque nudes of Jenny
Saville, that challenge notions of conventionality in the size and
shape of the human body. The rise of the movement led to the rehabilitation
of several artists working in a similar vein. These included Americans
Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub, and Cy
Twombly; and the British artist Lucian Freud, all of whose works have
been labelled Neo-Expressionist. The label has also been applied to sculpture.
Works by sculptors like the American Charles Simonds, the British artists
Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread, the Czech Magdalena Jetelova, the German
Isa Genzken and Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowitz, all contain Expressionist
features. In architecture, the term expressionist has been applied to
buildings such as the Sydney Opera House and the Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao. For more information, please see: History
of Expressionist Painting (1880-1930) and the Expressionist
Movement (1880s onwards).

Transavanguardia
(Trans-avant-garde) (1979 onwards)

The Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva
used the term "Transavanguardia" (beyond the avant-garde) in
Flash Art magazine in October 1979, when referring to international Neo-Expressionism.
But since then it has been used only to describe the work of Italian artists
working in the style during the 1980s and 1990s. They include Sandro Chia,
Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Mimmo Paladino. Transavantgarde artists
employed a free, figurative style of painting, with nostalgic references
to the Renaissance and its iconography.
They painted large-scale works in oil, including realistic and imaginary
portraits, religious and allegorical history paintings, and were inspired
also by Symbolism as well as
the colour palette of Fauvism.
Chia incorporated Italian Mannerism, Cubism, Futurism and Fauvism in his
narrative religious works; Paladino composed large mythological pictures
with both geometric and figurative motifs; Cucchi produced romantic scenes
of giants and mountains, inspired by Surrealism,
and incorporated the use of extra items, made from metal or clay, in his
painted works; Clemente was noted for his self-portraiture and intimate
figurative works. Their inclusion in major shows at the Kuntshalle in
Basel and the Venice Biennale in 1980, and the London Royal Academy in
1981, led to solo exhibitions in both Europe and America as well as a
rapid rise in the significance of the school.

Britart: Young
British Artists (1980s)

The Young
British Artists (YBAs) first appeared on the scene in the 1980s,
and were officially recognized in 1997 in the "Sensation"
exhibition. Owing much to early 20th century styles such as Dada and Surrealism,
their work is often called "Britart." The group consisted of
a number of painters, sculptors, conceptual and installation artists working
in the United Kingdom, many of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London.
Its members gained considerable media coverage for their shocking artworks
and dominated British art during the 1990s. Famous members include Damien
Hirst (noted for The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind
of Someone Living, a dead Tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde, and
lately for his diamond studded skull For the Love of God), and
Tracey Emin (noted for My
Bed, a dishevelled double bed featuring some highly personal detritus).

Arguably, many YBAs would never have succeeded
but for the patronage and promotion of their works by contemporary art
collector Charles Saatchi,
who first met Damien Hirst at the Goldsmiths College 1988 student exhibition
"Freeze", which showcased 16 YBAs. Saatchi purchased many of
the works on show. Two years later Hirst curated two more influential
YBA shows, "Modern Medicine" and "Gambler". Saatchi
attended both exhibitions and bought more works. By 1992, Saatchi was
not only Hirst's principal patron, he was also the biggest sponsor for
other Young British Artists - a second group of whom had appeared, via
shows like "New Contemporaries," "New British Summertime,"
and "Minky Manky", and included artists such as Tracey Emin.
Meantime, the economic recession in Britain worsened, triggering the collapse
of the contemporary art market in London. In response, Saatchi hosted
a series of exhibitions at his Saatchi
Gallery, promoting the name "Young British Art" from which
the movement retrospectively acquired its identity. The first one presented
the work of Sarah Lucas, Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread and of course
Damien Hirst, whose dead shark rapidly became the iconic symbol of Britart
around the world.

In 1993, the YBA Rachel Whiteread won the
Turner Prize, followed in 1995 by Damien Hirst. In 1997, Young British
Artists went mainstream when the London Royal Academy, in conjunction
with Saatchi, hosted "Sensation", a definitive exhibition of
YBA art, amid no little controversy. It then travelled to the Brooklyn
Museum of Art in New York. In 1999, Tracey Emin's work "My Bed"
was nominated for the Turner Prize, while in 2000, YBA exhibits were included
in the new Tate Modern, all of which confirmed the established reputation
of the group.

Deconstructivism is an "anti-geometric" form of 20th
century architecture that first appeared in the late 1980s, in California
and Europe. Greatly facilitated by computer software developed by the
aerospace industry, deconstructivist architecture espouses a non-rectilinear
approach to design which often distorts the exterior of a structure. Deconstructivism
was pioneered by the Canadian-American Frank
O. Gehry (b.1929), one of the most innovative American
architects of the postmodern era. Other famous practitioners have
included Peter Eisenman, the firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas and
Daniel Libeskind. The best-known deconstructivist buildings include: the
Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), Nationale Nederlanden Building (Prague), and
The Experience Music Project (Seattle), all designed by Frank Gehry; UFA-Palast
(Dresden), designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au; and Seattle Library designed
by Rem Koolhaas. See also: Design Art c.1850-1970.

Body Art (1990s)

During the late-1960s a type of performance
art appeared, called Body art,
in which the artist's own body became the "canvas", so to speak,
for a passive work of art, or which then "performs" in a shocking
way. The most typical forms of passive body art are body
painting, tattoos, nail art,
piercings, face painting, brandings or
implants. The more active performance-related types of body art, in which
artists abuse their own body as a way of conveying their particular "artistic
message", can include mutilation, drug-taking, extreme physical activity,
or extreme pain endurance. One controversial performance group was the
Vienna Action Group, founded in 1965 by Gunter Brus, Otto Muhl, Herman
Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. Other famous body artists include Michel
Journiac (1935-1995), Ketty La Rocca (1938-76), Vito Acconci (b.1940),
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) (b.1943) and the extraordinary Serbian artist
Marina Abramovic (b.1946).

A leading body painter is the New Zealander
Joanne Gair (b.1958). Celebrated for her trompe-l'oeil body painting and
make-up artistry, she is best known for one of her artistic female
nudes, entitled "Demi Moore's Birthday Suit" - which appeared
on the front cover of Vanity Fair magazine in August 1992. It was
photographed by the contemporary photographer Annie
Leibovitz (b.1949).

Chinese
Cynical Realism (1990s)

Cynical
Realism - a term first coined by the highly influential art critic
and curator Li Xianting (b.1949) as a deliberate play on the officially
sanctioned style of Socialist
Realism - describes a style of painting adopted by a number of Beijing
artists in the post-1989 gloom following the suppression of the Tiananmen
Square demonstration. Its ironic, sometimes highly satirical criticism
of contemporary society in China, greatly impressed Western art collectors,
although it was and is viewed with ambivalence by Chinese art critics,
who feel uncomfortable with its fame in the West. Artists associated with
Cynical Realism include: Yue Minjun (b.1962), Fang Lijun (b.1963) and
Zhang Xiaogang (b.1958), all of whom have sold paintings for more than
$1 million. The movement is related to "Political Pop" - a late-1980s
form of Chinese Pop art.

Neo-Pop Art
(late 1980s onwards)

The terms "Neo-Pop" or "Post-Pop"
denote the revival of American interest in the themes and methods of the
1950s and 1960s Pop-Art movement. In particular, it refers to the work
of artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff
Koons, Alan McCollum, and Haim Steinbach. Using recognizable objects,
images of celebrities (eg. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears) as
well as icons and symbols from popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s,
this updated form of Pop-Art also drew inspiration from Dada (in their
use of readymades and found
objects), as well as modern Conceptual art. Classic examples of Neo-Pop
art are "Rat-King" (1993) a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch,
and Jeff Koons 1988 sculpture "Michael Jackson and Bubbles".
Like its parent style, Neo-Pop poked fun at celebrity stars, and openly
questioned some of society's most precious assumptions. Koons himself
achieved considerable notoriety for his elevation of kitsch into high
art. His "Balloon Dog" (1994-2000) is a shiny red steel sculpture
(10 feet high) whose detailed monumental form contrasts absurdly with
the trivial nature of its subject. Other famous Neo-Pop artists included
Americans Jenny Holzer, Cady Noland and Daniel Edwards; Young British
Artists Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Gavin Turk, as well as Michael Craig-Martin,
Julian Opie and Lisa Milroy; Russians Vitali Komar and Alexander Melamid;
and Belgian artist Leo Coper.

NOTE: One of the confusing things about
Neo-Pop is the fact that several creators of the original 1960s and
70s Pop-art were still creating interesting works in the 1990s. The
best example is the sculptor Claes
Oldenburg (b.1929) whose giant-sized Pop sculptures include Free
Stamp (1985-91, Willard Park, Cleveland) and Apple Core (1992,
Israel Museum, Jerusalem).

Stuckism
(1999 onwards)

A controversial British art group, co-founded
in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish along with eleven other
artists. The name stems from an insult to Childish delivered by British
artist Tracey Emin, who advised him that his art was 'Stuck'. Rejecting
the sterile nature of Conceptual art, as well as Performance and Installation
by YBAs like Emin, which they claim is essentially devoid of artistic
value, Stuckist artists favour a return to more painterly qualities as
exemplified by figurative painting and
other representational art. The group held numerous exhibitions in Britain
during the early 2000s, including "The First Art Show of the New
Millennium" (Jan 1st 2000), and "The Resignation of Sir Nicholas
Serota" (March 2000), along with several annual shows entitled "The
Real Turner Prize Show", as well as a number of other events. The
group also in Paris, Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig, New Jersey, New Haven
USA and Melbourne Australia. Stuckism was also featured in two recent
books: "Styles, Schools and Movements: an Encyclopaedic Guide to
Modern Art," by Amy Dempsey; and "The Tastemakers: UK Art Now,"
by Rosie Millard. A Stuckist gallery was also opened in central London.
Members of the Stuckist group included, among others, Charles Thomson,
Billy Childish, Bill Lewis, Philip Absolon, Sanchia Lewis, Sheila Clark,
Ella Guru, and Joe Machine.

New Leipzig School
(c.2000 onwards)

Coming to public attention in the first
years of the new Millenium, the New Leipzig School (in German, "Neue
Leipziger Schule"), also called "Young German Artists"
(YGAs), is a loose movement of painters and sculptors who received their
training at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy
of Visual Arts) in Leipzig, East Germany, where it was largely isolated
from modern art trends in the West. Teaching methods were uniformly traditional,
focusing on the fundamentals of traditional fine
art, with heavy emphasis on draftsmanship, figure
drawing, life drawing, the use of grids, colour theory, and the laws
of perspective. After re-unification in 1989, the school began to teach
students from all across Germany and its graduates looked for opportunities
to sell their works in the West. The first successful artist to emerge
was Neo Rauch who was offered a solo show at the David Zwirner Gallery
in New York in 2000. His success has now opened the gates for other equally
talented Leipzig artists, whose works are being showcased in Europe and
the United States. Their style is typically figurative with a strong emphasis
on narrative, and is characterized by muted colours.

Classical Realism and the Postmodern
Atelier Movement
The New Leipzig School is one of several contemporary centres of traditional
craftsmanship. In the United States, traditional fine art painting was
revitalized in the 1980s by "Classical Realism", a contemporary
movement founded by Richard Lack (19282009), a former pupil of
Boston artist R. H. Ives Gammell (18931981) in the early 1950s.
In 1967, he set up Atelier Lack, a training workshop modelled
on the ateliers of 19th-century Paris.

Projection
Art (21st Century)

Projection art - also known as Projection
mapping, or video mapping, or spatial augmented reality - is the height
of postmodernist artistry. Using computerized projection technology it
needs only a surface (like a building, church facade, tree, and so on)
upon which to project the finished product. Any imagery can be mapped
onto the receiving surface and the effects can be spectacular: it can
literally transform an outside or indoor space, while at the same time
telling a story and creating an optical feast. Famous projection artists
include Paolo Buroni, Clement Briend, Ross Ashton, Jennifer Steinkamp,
Andy McKeown and Felice Varini, to name but a few.

Computer Art
(21st Century)

Dating back to the Henry Drawing Machine,
designed by Desmond Paul Henry in 1960, the term "Computer
art" denotes any art in which computers play a significant
role. This broad definition also embraces more conventional art forms
that utilize computers, such as: computer-controlled animation or kinetic
art, or computer-generated painting - as well as those forms that are
based on computer software, like Deconstructivist architecture. Computer
art may also be called "Digital art", "Internet art",
"Software art", or "Computer graphics". Pioneers of
this type of art include Harold Cohen, Ronald Davis, George Grie, Jean-Pierre
Hebert, Bela Julesz, Olga Kisseleva, John Lansdown, Maughan Mason, Manfred
Mohr and Joseph Nechvatal. Later digital artists included: Charles Csuri,
Leslie Mezei, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Nam June Paik
and John Whitney. Other important research pioneers included: Professor
Harold Cohen, UCSD, and Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley. The earliest exhibitions
of computer art included: "Generative Computergrafik" (1965)
at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany; "Computer-Generated
Pictures" (1965) at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York; "Computer
Imagery" (1965) at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich, in Stuttgart, Germany;
"Cybernetic Serendipity" (1968) at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London. In the 21st century, computer art has become the latest
arena of contemporary art - a sort of ultimate postmodernism. In fact,
computer-generated art is highly revolutionary - not least because it
is has the capability (as artificial intelligence grows) to achieve complete
artistic independence. Watch this space!